I'm not really in a position to judge that ... I don't have a clue of most people's programming work! (Never seen a like of code by Dennis Ritchie for example).
But for me personally? My dad. Because he first taught me how to program.

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2- Most enjoyable piece of software you happen to be using ?

All software sucks, except the software that I wrote (and you probably have a different opinion about my software).

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3- Most important political figure of the new century ?

Osama Bin Laden probably shaped the political landscape more than any other person.

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4- Most interesting website ?

Wikipedia. In spite of it's flaws (and there are many!)

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5- Most convincing (or persuading ! ) OS you ever used :

FreeBSD, OpenBSD, both have different strengths/weaknesses.

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6- Most convincing programming language -as to your personal needs- ?

Mostly Python. But this is subject to change as I try and pick up more languages (Currently learning Haskell).

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7- Most detrimental human behavior ?

Discussing human nature ("the good, the bad, and the ugly" of it ) is beyond the scope of this website...

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

Hi CarpetSmoker ! at last ! there is one hacker accepting a newb's invitation .. thanks

1 - well .. maybe I am prejudiced here because I believe since c has got a shining history and honorable reputation and is at the core of every kernel so being in love with bsd presupposes and entails being in love with Archetypal C !!

2 - wow ! I'd be happy to learn about that .. in what prog lge mainly ? not c I bet ..

3 - Maybe partialy true in certain areas but remains limited , but I believe Assange has done what no other human being did .. I remember Bruce Lee the thinker -not the martial artist- once said : "water can crash or it can flow .. be water my friend" .. Assange has got a flowing power , not a crashing power .. a power which buils instead of destroy .. as I believe he is being the most mankind-centric truth-advocator and truth-miner .. my opinion and I respect all other opinions ..

4- obviously you are a php programmer so you know what is going on badly .. while I can't .. :-(
maybe you just disappove of the extent to which users-supplied information has been through scrutiny and validity check etc .. a perpetual dilemma because meaning is positional .. and a historical event is more or less nothing more than somebody's comment on it ..

6 - nice to know about !!

7 - it can never and should never be overlooked .. why then are there some forum-related rules .. lol .. it is no harm discussing all issues provided that it be politely and amicably .. despite differences .. ideologies .. etc ..

Happy to learn about Carpetsmoker's ... thanks .. waiting for other hackers ..

1 - well .. maybe I am prejudiced here because I believe since c has got a shining history and honorable reputation and is at the core of every kernel so being in love with bsd presupposes and entails being in love with Archetypal C !!

Perhaps ... But it's not like Dennis Ritchie singlehanded invented C ... To quote the famous quote: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants".
Perhaps Ken Thompson was *more* influential? He wrote C's direct predecessor, B, he also started UNIX. Then again, UNIX would never have been as successful as it is without C (first versions were written in assembly, it got ported to C later).
How does one measure this sort of thing anyway? It seems quite impossible to me.
I think it's silly to say that "person X is *the* most influential programmer". I would say that Dennis Ritchie is *a* influential programmer instead.

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4- obviously you are a php programmer so you know what is going bad .. while I can't .. :-(
maybe you just disappove of the extent to which users-supplied information has been through scrutiny and validity check etc .. a perpetual dillema because meaning is positional ..

I'm not sure what being a PHP programming has to do with this ...?

I have a few problems with wikipedia, in short:
1) It's a pain to change stuff. You have to battle hordes of idiots, autistic tunnelvision people, and plain trolls.

2) There are people who relentlessly just *delete* entire blocks of text without sufficient reason (the main excuse nowadays is "not notable enough"). They usually use dirty hacks to circumvent the stringent rules regarding deletions (the main one is emptying a page and redirect it to something else. Ever notice how many wikipedia pages contain links to itself or strange destinations? This is why).

3) *If* you finally made your change and got a page in reasonable shape, it's a challenge to *keep* it that way. See point 1.

I like wikipedia to get a quick overview of the info, and the "external links" and/or references usually provide more info if I need it.

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2 - wow ! I'd be happy to learn about that .. in what prog lge mainly ? not c I bet ..

Mostly it's not very polished ... I actually use most of it myself, and it works quite well for *me*, mainly because it was specifically written for *my* needs, which is why it doesn't suck for *me* I release the source because ... well, why not?

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Assange has done what no other human being did

Cryptonome did was Assange did long before Assange did it. As did many other websites.
Besides, can you name one single *concrete* thing that got changed because of wikileaks? I'm sure there are examples, but I can't think of any out of the top of my head ...

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7 - it can never and should never be overlooked .. why then are there some forum-related rules .. lol .. it is no harm discussing all issues provided that it be politely and amicably .. despite differences .. ideologies .. etc ..

This is a subject of many books, and *much* controversy ...

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

it is no harm discussing all issues provided that it be politely and amicably .. despite differences .. ideologies .. etc ..

There are topics which some have very passionate opinions that are different from the very passionate opinions of others. Everyone believes they have thought through all the counter-arguments so listening to opposing sides only revisits old ground already covered. Nothing is gained in such exchanges.

This also possibly fuels animosity which can potentially spill into technical discussions. Given that this site focuses on technical discussion, discussing non-technical topics ends up being counterproductive. This is why most on this site stay clear of such potential powder kegs. It serves little purpose, & it does not further our fundamental goal.

That's so interesting to read Friend Carpetsmoker !
interesting points concerning wikipedia .. they need to hear your voice ..
your quoting the quote explains maybe how those giants were great humble and non-narcissist .. well in fact it reminds me of Linux Thorvald's saying ..
yes both are {influentional hackers} .. so {most} is intruder here .. but for sake of 7most lol .. 7up ... usually when I said {influential} it gets relativised by the one who's approaching the topic/Q .. while I meant ifluential programmer as far as computing chronics are concerned .. without c there would be no embedding technologies .. no tiny OSes .. no portability .. no kernel tweaks .. {assembly ==> c} was one of the biggest turning point ..

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can you name one single *concrete* thing that got changed because of wikileaks?

star-highlighted concretism makes the whole difference .. I believe wikileaks has redefined the notion of democracy/justice/'polycultural interpeace'/transparency/security/philanthropism/ ...... a lot of ideas taken for granted .. at peril now ..
many mindsets are changing thanks to wikileaks .. many 'maxims' .. 'truisms' .. this is a change ! .. in the long run .. it will bring about deeper changes at different levels and strata .. that's karma ..
As for the cryptome -new news for me- .. isn't it radically different doing *geeky* out of moral obligation and doing *geekything* out of pragmatic narcissism (money-fame-hostility-enemity)?

I paid you a short but pleasant visit home and said hello with a {$wget -r --no-parent ..}.. :-) and saw part of your coding genius .. how nice to produce something useful out of digits and algorithms .. I hope some day I will be able to join the coding community as more than just a passive beholder and admirer ..

Thanks again .. that's actually what I was hoping to see with the somehow insane {Most_7} thing ..

Given that this site focuses on technical discussion, discussing non-technical topics ends up being counterproductive

maybe true for some .. except for the wikileaks issue , all other questions were off-politika ..
I once read something like {OpenBSD is to stay as politically-neutral as possible} .. yes .. for the same reason that you mentioned ..
ok let's drop that question .. or maybe you'd want to remove or close the thread .. no problem Ocicat ..
:-)

two extremely antagonist brains from widely discrepant extreme *frontiers* .. both are impulsive and dogmatic .. both showing no readiness to rethink , crititique and reconsider their opinions and views .. here we can say it's a hopeless case .. lol ..

such a case is probable if not common .. nonetheless I believe I'm here among well educated folk .. well-principled .. book-worms .. well-tempered .. the cream of the cream ..
maybe it turns to be a world of sharply warring ideas .. but then at least let us try to reconcile them , then if we fail , we try at least to approach the issue the RIGHT WAY ..
the right way is the whole issue .. so what's the right way ?
it's a long way .. which starts by this important basis : that my opinion/dogma might be false ... likewise .. yours might be so too .. no kierkegaard's either/or no more ..
sorry again if I have triggered things off daemonland .. just the corner called off-topic is a bit alluring .. lol ..

I’m pretty fond of the Bell Labs crowd: Thompson, Kernighan, Ritchie, Pike… I wouldn’t call them “innovative” so much as “inspiring.”

I really love that the books they write are thin. This is in contrast with, say, Knuth (who is a great writer, but one who writes and writes and writes and writes…)

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2- Most enjoyable piece of software you happen to be using ?

UTF‐8–aware nvi, and piped software in general (since that lets me edit stuff in UTF‐8–aware nvi!).

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3- Most important political figure of the new century ?

Ron Paul!

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4- Most interesting website ?

Too many to list, but I’m quite fond of link aggregation sites and blogs, despite the fact that they’re humongous timesinks…

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5- Most convincing (or persuading ! ) OS you ever used :

OpenBSD. Most convincing OS I’ve never used: Plan 9.

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6- Most convincing programming language -as to your personal needs- ?

Depends on the context. Assembly for concepts, C for general use, shell scripts for quick and dirty. I’ve been meaning to try out Go. Now that OpenBSD has rthreads in by default, I guess I have no excuse not to.

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7- Most detrimental human behavior ?

The idea that person/group/government A can (or should) force person B to do something through rule of law. Whether it’s US government policy or just the GPL…

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Many thanks to the forum regulars who put time and effort into helping others solve their problems.

Above text was first published in the Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 7, July, 1974, pp. 365-375.
In 1971 when UNIX was moved to a PDP-11, system was characterized by its small size: 16K bytes for the system, 8K bytes for user programs, a disk of 512K bytes, and a limit of 64K bytes per file. After its early success, Thompson set out to implement a Fortran compiler for the new system, but instead came up with the language B, influenced by BCPL. B was interpretive language with the performance drawbacks implied by such languages, so Ritchie developed it into one he called C, allowing generation of machine code, declaration of data types, and definition of data strucures. In 1973, the operating system was rewritten in C, an unheard of step at the time, but on that was to have tremendous impact on its acceptance among outside users. And these is the real heritage of the UNIX. Kernel that is written almost in 100% in high level language --> witch determine its portability to other computer platforms.

And to be fair, I'm using emacs to write this and it's not unenjoyable. I suppose I could hook acme up to It's All Text. It's just when I attempt a 2nd instance it says, "9pserve: announce unix!/tmp/ns.username.:0/acme: Address already in use
acme: can't post service: 9pserve failed"

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3- Most important political figure of the new century ?

No one's yet appeared of any great prominence. Let's hope this trend continues.

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4- Most interesting website ?

archive.org

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5- Most convincing (or persuading ! ) OS you ever used :

OpenBSD. I hope to be persuaded by plan 9 someday if I can ever figure out how to get it running on my hardware and can learn to live without certain software. Having fun with plan9port.

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6- Most convincing programming language -as to your personal needs- ?

C++ - expressive, general purpose, performant, and able to do what C can for system code.

Though realistically for my personal needs so far probably anything would cut it. I'm not writing simulations, compilers or operating systems here. I'd say Perl but I think if I learned them better I might prefer Common Lisp or Scheme. If I learned further, then something along the lines of ML (maybe ocaml) might be best, but I don't know yet having only begun to learn ML and having put it aside when the latest Stroustrup book came out.

Besides, can you name one single *concrete* thing that got changed because of wikileaks? I'm sure there are examples, but I can't think of any out of the top of my head ...

It was of course not the only factor but I've heard the uprising in Tunisia linked to the revelations in the diplomat cables. That idea sounded more convincing to me than the explanation that it was a "twitter revolution."

I had a good laugh reading the U.S. ambassador to Canada writing about anti-american sentiment as shown in certain tv shows on the cbc. I consider me being successfully entertained a concrete thing, though I guess not much in the grand scheme of things.

5) Plan 9 and QNX (QNX had a Free version years ago which they don't seem to have anymore...and I lost my copy). Only thing with both are lack of apps that I need.

6) Python- I like that it doesn't get in my way. And when I use other languages now I still think in Python or Pythonically as they say. Professionally I have to use C# daily.

7) The belief in authority.

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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick

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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick